Using router-mounted USB ext drive for Time Machine?

[fb6668]

Hi all,

I've been using a Time Capsule with Time Machine for backups for the last forever, but I'm getting ready to upgrade it to a bigger drive, as I have several computers all backing up to the same disk (and, in any event, I have a sneaky suspicion the drive is about to fail).

I'm considering that TC might not be the best value option for me, although I love the convenience, so am looking for alternatives. One option is to replace the HDD in the TC, which I did the last time it failed, but I can't find any info to tell me what larger drives would work, just that some won't. If I don't go down that route, then I'm considering a 6TB external drive (Seagate or similar) plugged into the USB slot on my router. This is what I've been testing out this morning and where I'm falling a bit short.

Router is a Huawei 3G wireless router. I have turned on Samba sharing and have created a user. I'm testing for now with a 64GB pen drive. From my iMac, I can connect to the drive through smb://192.168.8.1/Username. At first, I couldn't do anything else, but I found out that it needs to be formatted as FAT32 in order to allow read/write and, since I've done this, I can read and write files to the drive without issue.
My problem is that it doesn't appear as an option for a backup device in Time Machine. I thought this may be to do with the formatting, but when I plug the pen drive directly into my iMac, it appears in the list of available drives.

So, before I go buying an external HDD, is there a way I can set it up so that it plugs into the USB port on my router (so multiple network computers can back up to it) and that Time Machine can use it?

Thanks for your help.

FYI: My Macs are all using High Sierra

 

[techwarrior]

There is an extension to the Samba\SMB sharing protocol that High Sierra needs in order to see an SMB share as viable for Time Machine. Most, including Microsoft do not support this extension, F_FullfSync.

So, most likely, a router would need to have added support for this to be able to share for TM purposes. Some newer routers appear to support this, but not all. The Samba working groups are apparently looking into adding this feature to the Samba packages, it may be available by now. But, the router would need to incorporate the newer Samba packages as well.

An alternative may be to attach a USB Drive to the Time Capsule as described here.

 

[fb6668]

Thanks for that.
I'll look at the option of attaching the USB drive to the TC and replace the failing drive.